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Dr. Foot’s Specialty? Philadelphia Basketball

Community College of Philadelphia playing the Mike Anderson All-Stars in a Rankin-Anderson game. Credit
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — On a recent night of the Rankin-Anderson summer basketball league, players and coaches and fans went out of their way to say hello to a man named Dave Scheiner. Everybody called him Dr. Foot.

Scheiner is a retired podiatrist and the man behind the most popular league in a city of rich basketball tradition. The league is his continuing contribution to the city game he has stood at the center of for 30 years. Ask people about Scheiner, however, and the response will be blank stares.

“Nobody knows my real name, actually,” he said recently, laughing. “Some of these guys don’t even know I’m a foot doctor. They think that’s really my name, like I’m a medical doctor and my last name is Foot.”

Scheiner, 58, became the commissioner of the Rankin-Anderson League soon after it started in 2002 with five teams. Today, it has 16 teams and draws players from the N.B.A. and overseas as well as schoolyard legends young and old. Admission is free for the thousands of fans who turn out to city gyms on weeknights and some Saturdays in July and August.

Before this latest endeavor, Scheiner organized and coached championship teams in more than a dozen leagues. They all carried the Dr. Foot name, a kind of franchise he developed after opening a podiatry practice in 1977. He is also entering his fifth season as an assistant coach of the team at Community College of Philadelphia, where he is a mentor to players who have had tough upbringings.

Scheiner, who is white and Jewish, has always stood out around here. With his uneven gray beard and gray hair, and glasses perched at the end of his nose, he resembles a rumpled grandfather. But for three decades, he has made basketball his bond with people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Bill Claiborne, 52, a longtime friend and the league announcer who is known as Buck James, described Scheiner as “the only white guy walking down North Philly like he owned it.” He added, “With him there’s no black and white, and that’s what broke the barrier.”

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Dave Scheiner, the man behind the popular league.

The summer tradition began in the 1960s and flourished under Sonny Hill, who still runs a league for amateurs. Hill used to lead the Charles Baker League, which attracted players like Earl Monroe, Bill Bradley and Wilt Chamberlain. After that league closed in 2001, Mike Anderson, a former Drexel star, and two friends filled the void. The league they started is named for John Rankin, who was Anderson’s college teammate and a city police officer who died of leukemia in 2003. Scheiner coached an original team and then became commissioner.

Like the Baker League, the Rankin-Anderson League attracts some of the best N.B.A. players from the area, like John Salmons, Hakim Warrick, Kyle Lowry and Lou Williams. The competition is intense, and, fittingly for Philadelphia, the league makes room for the underdog: it is open to all comers, as long as Scheiner believes the team belongs. After retiring as a podiatrist in March 2005, he made the league his pet project.

Scheiner spent his childhood in Long Island and studied podiatry in New York City, where he was a player and coach in the medical school league. He likes to say he led the league in technical fouls each year.

He moved to Philadelphia in 1976 for his residency. As in New York, he coached his small community hospital team. Once he started his own practice, he treated patients who, upon seeing basketball trophies in his office, encouraged him to get involved in a city teeming with summer leagues.

He entered this scene headfirst, recruiting players, holding practices and stressing defense. He expected players to copy his desire and competitiveness.

One of his earliest players was Claiborne, then in his early 20s. Claiborne said Scheiner, seen driving his Mercedes-Benz through North Philadelphia, was tough and eager and quickly earned respect.

By the 1980s, some of the best players around clamored to join the Dr. Foot franchise. The draw, besides winning championships, was that his teams had the best uniforms, traveled for national tournaments and had their own hangout, a bar he owned for many years.

A normal summer night meant Scheiner and his teams had three games in a row. He enlisted backup players who lived in the neighborhood to show up early to avoid a forfeit. In one particularly strict league, Scheiner said, he resorted to driving his car across the lawn to the gym’s entrance so his players arrived on time.

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The N.B.A. player Hakim Warrick, standing, joking with other players in the league.Credit
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

As his basketball franchise grew, so, too, did Scheiner’s professional career. His practice expanded to 10 satellite offices around the city, he said, along with work at hospitals and nursing homes. And yet, as many patients as he helped, he found his services in greater demand elsewhere.

“He helped people, he helped us,” Claiborne said. “We’re from the ghetto. Doc came in, and he turned my life around.”

A year ago, a former player, whom Scheiner had not heard from in 15 years, asked him to meet with his son. The young man, Corey Bethea, 23, had been a gifted player at Germantown High School and had attended Cheyney University on an athletic scholarship before dropping out. In 2006, he and two others were arrested in connection with an armed robbery, and the next year he pleaded guilty to robbery and spent nearly two years in prison.

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“This is not about basketball; this is about life,” Scheiner said he told Bethea when they first met. He stressed that only an education would help him turn his life around. Bethea went out for the community college team and became its best player. Scheiner tutored him in math and English, and Bethea passed all of his courses. He has received interest from Division I and II programs for the 2010-11 season.

Resolved to reconcile his past, Bethea said he had followed everything Scheiner advised him to do. “We talk almost every day,” he said. “He’s a great guy, a great guy to be around.”

Scheiner, who is divorced and has two grown daughters, said, “There’s no greater reward than helping a kid who thinks of himself as a failure before he even steps on the court.”

Working the scoreboard on a recent night of the Rankin-Anderson League, Scheiner watched as the play turned bruising. A few minutes into the game, Scheiner shot out of his seat and onto the court to eject a player for cursing.

“You can’t have that,” he repeated to the coach and the player. The player towered over Scheiner, but he walked over to his bench and sat down. After the game, the player approached Scheiner.

“Foot, my man,” he said, offering his hand. The player knew better than to get on the wrong side of a man who helps make Philadelphia basketball tick.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: His Specialty? Philadelphia Basketball. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe